It gave enough backstory for my girlfriend (who never saw the series) to know what was going on, and even covered some stuff I missed in the series (like the setting being one big solar system, not interstellar).

I missed in the series (like the setting being one big solar system, not interstellar).

You didn't miss it, they just didn't mention it.It was the subject of much debate amongst fans before the movie, in fact. I thought they had more than one solar system, since it was implied in the way they talked about systems and whatnot, but, seems not.

Whedon simply didn't get the difference between a solar system, a group of stars with solar systems, and a galaxy. He may have been straightened out later.

I was butting my head on this for a while: after all, if the new solar system was colonized by Earth, then - bloody hell! - they had interstellar drives. For hundreds of millons of passengers.

But the series never shows anyone making star hops. They're all fusion rockets, and they only travel a few million miles, spending weeks or days en route. Probably deuterium/tritium fueled.

What happened to the mighty starships? What happened to the Terran supertransports? And didn't anyone read "The High Frontier" on Earth? Why go to another star and terraform planets when you can stay around our solar system and build land areas in habitats with congomerate land area millions of times that of Earth's surface?

The confusion rattled me after I figured out that Serenity wasn't a starship. If the author can't figure out the difference between a solar system, a group of stars WITH solar systems, and a galaxy of Earths, he ain't writing science fiction -- he's using the form instead. Sci-Fi instead of SF. With the caveat that his universe doesn't make any sense.

However, I ignore all that and love the movie. I just wish they taught astronomy in writing classes.

The very same thing bothered me. I haven't seen the movie yet (but I'm going, 100%) and I'm honestly disappointed that it's all a big solar system. I guess I had pictured a cluster of stars, each with planets. Very important for the show is the notion of the core planets and "farther out" planets. But I did initially picture this on a galactic scale...

I suppose it makes things a little better that these planets have many moons, all of which are terraformed and include artificial gravity (I know, hard to imagine - and all conveniently have the landscape of southern California). But there are laws of physics (maybe math, actually) about how close together planetary orbits may come in a stable solar system. There just can't be many orbits in the habitable zone. (Anything outside of the bands of Venus and Mars would not look like California no matter how good the terraforming is.) So why aren't the outer planets cold?

You're right, many other details are thought out, but Whedon is delinquent on giving us a map of the settled planets, or even a sketch. I imagine he wants to, but can't make it fit with the requirements of the narrative. What the narrative requires is something analogous to an archipelago on the sea - a space that is densely populated with many moons and planets. That's just not gonna happen; the more you say about it, the sillier it would sound, so Whedon just ingnores the subject. If I were him, I'd have been more direct about it up front, bit the bullet on superluminal travel, and made Serenity an interstellar ship. This would explain the huge interstellar migration you mention... The downside is that Serenity seems too crappy to be superluminal... but then again, the Millennium Falcon was also a piece of crap and nobody had problems picturing hyperdrive. But there is something weird about people who can afford an interstellar spaceship but still use revolvers to shoot each other. Yes, a quirk of the show.

So with the solar system thing, I think Whedon is digging himself deeper, and he should have worked out these things when he first conceived the show. Absent that, he just shouldn't address the issue. Anything he says about this will only make matters worse.

Why would they react any differently than they have been? They've known that the internet is a great advertising medium, and this is just another way of advertising. They're still going to be against the distribution of the whole movie, though.

"I have to wonder, if this works to boost revenue for Serenity, what will the MPAA's response be? It only took them, what, ten years to realize the internet can help them?"

What an interesting thing to say. I remember that Strange Days [imdb.com] had a rather kick-ass web site for its time... and that was in 1995. Since then, I've lost count of the number of well-executed Internet ad campaigns I've seen for films. I know that many Slashdotters may have only been on the Internet for a few years so this sort of th

That's odd. I saw Serenity last weekend with friends who had never seen Firefly and they had not trouble keeping up with what was going on. Yes, they lost some of the richness of the story, but they did a fine job of filling in the blanks for most reasonably observant people.

I, and the people I was with, thought Serenity stood well on its own. Going in, I didn't know who the characters were, but on the way out I felt very attached to them. I never felt lost. I assume there were probably some jokes that I didn't get, because I didn't watch Firefly, but the movie was exciting and funny enough on its own.

Aaargh. So they're using a weird plugin (bad) but the plugin is written in Java (good) but the plugin only works on Windows (bad again). Why would you make people download a plugin (and maybe a jre) but then forgo the alleged chief benefit of Java? (Write once, run almost anywhere)... If they wanted windows only with drm, why not just use Windows Media and active-x?

You're an idiot. Go get the figures for desktop operating system market share.

If he's an idiot, you are a sexpot.

Go get the figures for desktop operating systems that support MPEG4. Wow - 100%. So, they could have picked a format that has both *more* coverage and is technically just as good. Instead they chose something that is arbitrarily restricted. Smart move.

And by doing that, they spent more money to get fewer users. Fine, you can say that the fact that they got fewer users doesn't matter, because the number of people who don't suck Microsoft's cock, is insignificant to them. A million here, a million there, pretty soon you're talking.. uh, nothing.

But that still doesn't justify the extra expense. They went to all that trouble to write some kind of Java player or weird web thingie (and then put in extra code to "support" certain OSes), when all they had

As far as I'm concerned, they haven't made it available. I have a high speed dsl connection (1.5Mbps), and I have never seen streaming video work with anything like watchable quality (though part of that is because I have a high resolution screen, and the embedded viewers won't let you resize it up to more than a postage stamp). If I can't download something of reasonable quality and then watch it for real, then there's no point in wasting the bandwidth trying.

Come on now, it's obvious to me that Serenity's fans are boosting the review averages all over the place. Nothing wrong about that, but keep that in mind. Best film of all time?? Let's get serious here, it's a good 2 hours of entertainment, nothing earth shattering here.

On Yahoo movies, Serenity is ranked as the number 1 film currently in theaters and is hanging in a top-ten spot in the highest rated movies of all time.

As with the majority of slashdot posters on here, I am a total sci-fi junkie, but does Serenity really qualify to be within the top 10 movies of all time? Granted, this is a yahoo poll and probably was saturated by people so desperate for anything with a futuristic theme they're willing to hump a movie which was written by a guy who make a witch turn lesbian in another show with declining ratings.

I seriously cannot understand what is so great and original about this movie. Sci-fi meets cowboy theme has already been stretched in 26 episodes (plus a movie) of Cowboy Bebop.

I don't even see Bladerunner on this Yahoo top 10 of all time list. Dune? Seriously, are you going to tell me Serenity is better than Bladerunner?

"Seriously, are you going to tell me Serenity is better than Bladerunner?Yep."

Serenity is not ambitious enough to be in that sort of company. I'm a big fan of the Firefly TV series but this movie is a serious step down from the TV series. The writing and acting were much better in several episodes. I get the feeling they might have felt it necessary to dumb it down for a movie audience. It is loud and fast with lots of fighting action but that was only one aspect of the TV episodes. I hope they are successf

While I agree with the majority of your comments (which are much more reasonable than both sides of argument I've seen about the movie), I do take issue with your strict definition of entertainment. This is a common theme among Slashdot posters, that you think it takes a seriously spiritual and intellectual script to make a good movie. I don't think this is necessarily true. While it can help a movie to be as ambitious as Bladerunner, it does not mean that another movie which does not preach the same level of values is to be written off so easily. You, and others like you, may seek intellectual persuits in every facet of your life; but some, like myself, enjoy forms of entertainment that don't require deep textual analysis.

Serenity and Bladerunner are both great movies, but I don't think they reach the same goals as to be ranked on just one scale.

I seriously cannot understand what is so great and original about this movie. Sci-fi meets cowboy theme has already been stretched in 26 episodes (plus a movie) of Cowboy Bebop.

Orgiinaility is a horrible way to compare the greatness of works. I think it was Orson Scott Card that wrote if you worry about duplicating a specific story you will never get anything done. Ironically, after searching throuwh wikipedia for Flash Gordon I noticed that George Lucas used that as his inspiration for Star Wars. Remember

So, you have a problem with lesbians? When Willow turned lesbian it was a risky move, not the instant ratings builder it is now. And I never felt like they exploited the relationship for ratings. Hell, Willow only actually kissed Tera on screen in the episode where Tera gets killed. They spent most of the time with Willow and Tera exploring the problems people go through in relationships.As for Cowboy Bebop, I can't say. I don't like Cowboy Bebop.

It's interesting that Serenity could make so much headway into the Yahoo movie ranking after earning a paltry $10M in the box office in its opening weekend. To put that in perspective, Duece Bigalow 2 & Herbie Fully Loaded were on par with $10M the first weekend it opened. I may be pointing out the obvious here but it seems like Serenity has a higher percentage of computer literate [uncyclopedia.org] viewers than most movies and they inflated Serenity's ratings.

Better then bladrunner? probably for a lot of people it will be. Not for me.Better then Dune? listent to two comic book geeks argue over which who is better, superman or batman would be better then Dune.The frontier theme has been done in a lot of sc-fi, so what? the characters are no where near the same, either is the 'world' in which they are base, the stories are different, and the character interaction is different as well.other then that, yeah there practically the same.

Most of kids I work with are barely aware of Aliens. Bladerunner will remain great in the minds of those who remember it (especially before the POS "Director's Cut"). Anyway, space + cowboys... Anyone remember Outland? It's "High Noon" in space.

Er.... Lord of the rings was more or less the ONLY fantasy blockbuster the last decade or two.And all recent star trek movies more or less flopped (and star wars is a money machine by itself)(compare that to the relativly big success of the alien movies, event horizon, pitch black, ect (the non-non-horror SF stories ))

with no new star trek and star wars fare in the pipe, desperate sci fi serial pulp fans are jumping ship and clinging to this piece of driftwood

As if the "Star Wars fare" that's been coming down the pipe lately was the greatest sci-fi ever. Yeah, of course I loved A New Hope, and Empire Strikes back, but then it all started going downhill from there... and I think Serenity's better than any one of them. WAY better than Attack of the (yawn) Clones. Jeez, I'll never get those two hours back.

Have you seen Battlestar Galactica? Either the mini-series or the show? Because that's the best sci-fi I've seen, period. Firefly is good, don't get me wrong - I like it, a lot, but Battlestar Galactica completely destroys it.

If you think we're in a dry spell, maybe you should look a little harder.

Universal Exec : Ok guys, let's do something completely new : We will make the first nine minutes of Serenity available online !Henchman : Ok, but how much do we charge them for it ?Universal Exec : Nothing, we just let them see the first...Henchman : Ok, popups ? Right, popups ?!Universal Exec : No, we will just let them see...Henchman : I got you : Ads, right ? Banners !Universal Exec : No, we will JUST let them see the first nine...Henchman : Ok, but we HAVE to annoy them somehow... How about some proprietary plugin instead of going for the normal formats ? Let's screw a littlebit with their minds before they get their free content.Universal Exec : Fuckit, it's lunchtime.

Fun first nine minutes. Very exciting. These people are idiots, though. The beginning was so awesome I definitely would have paid four or five bucks to watch it after watching the beginning. I'll go to the theater to see it, but I doubt they'll see four or five dollars of my money once the theater cut is out of the way.

Serenity at the local cinema with several friends, one, like me, was a fan of the short-lived Firefly series, and the other 3 had never seen it before. Everyone enjoyed the movie, and although obviously it's something that is going to appeal more to fans of the series (mostly because these people are more attached to the characters), it does work as a stand alone movie very well. The brilliantly delivered dry humour, drama and all out action sequences are more than enough to satisfy almost everyone in the audience.

The only shame I feel about this movie is that it is a gem released during such a mundane (IMHO) year for theatrical releases, so although it stands out from the 2005 crowd, that in itself unfortunately isn't saying much at all. Still, I'd recommend it very highly to those who havn't seen it yet. And if you are even a more moderate fan of the series, then what the hell are you waiting for? Gogogo.

One thing that did dissapoint me was the lack of the theme tune, unless I missed it, but I didn't hear even a snippet during the whole movie:-(

This same story was posted on www.digg.com about 30 hours before/. had it up.
That, and I'd bet that a lot of the/. readers who might care about Serenity have already seen it in the theater.
Plus, its not a linux-compatible stream.

His "obsession" as you call it comes from his origional inspiration for Firefly and the Buffyverse: the Uncanny X-Men. His favorite comic book character is a character named Shadowcat, who is young, troubled, etc. Buffy is pretty much a duplicate of Shadowcat, as is River and Kaylee in a much lesser degree. If you enjoy Wheldon's work, check out Astonishing X-Men which has been running for about 2 years now.

Wheldon is a master story teller, and I am really enjoying his work. I saw Firefly last weekend and immediatly went on a hard target search for Firefly this weekend. Watched the entire series, and am blown away. I never know TV could be this good. Too good to continue I guess:(

Not really. I think about 16 years old is normally an acceptable age of a woman for a man to be attracted to. Remeber, about 100 years ago, most kids were getting married around age 15. Dying at 30 moves things along little faster.

Anyway, as long as the woman is physically mature, I don't think the guy is a pedophile, and the obsession doesn't seem harmful to society -- as long as he can wait two years.

A person should always wait for a girl to reach 18, not because one would hurt her by having icky sex with her, but because our society is apeshit insane and would tear her and her older partner to shreds. So waiting until she's of age is just sanity in an insane world.Of course, if everyone who'd had sex with an underaged partner were actually found out and prosecuted, the US would just become a giant prison complex full of lifers. I'd not be in there with the majority of y'all, but that's because I had a

Correction to the submission: this is being released by United International Pictures [uip.com], the company responsible for international release of Serenity. Since UIP is partially owned by Universal, it might be seen as semantics, but UIP has a distinct marketing plan for the movie from that of Universal.

It's also important to note, because it might seem like odd timing for Universal to release new marketing materials for a movie already released - it might even seem a move of desperation to get "butts in seats" before it leaves theaters... but it makes more sense as new marketing released by UIP for a movie they are opening today or within the next few weeks.

Okay.I'm one of those people who reads slashdot regularly, runs linux on his computer, and has NOT watched the show Firefly and did NOT go see the movie the week it opened.However, I do love sci-fi, I just never took the opportunity to get hooked on this show. (I have enough vices already!)

In any case, look: Advertising, after a movie has been released, is to encourage those who have not seen the movie or may not have been following it so closely but who _might_ be interested, to fork out the $10 and go check it out. I admit, the trailer was sort of interesting but nothing that really grabbed my attention. Mostly it's the hype I've read on this website that has kept me interested, and is what is making me want to go see it. I have no idea about the Firefly story, but since everyone seems to think it's so amazing I might be pursuaded to go see it, especially with a little enticement like showing me the first few minutes of the movie.

Now. I run linux. So I can't watch this "teaser". Let me repeat: I AM PRECISELY THE TARGET AUDIENCE for this advertisement, and yet the message I get when I actually make the effort of clicking on the link and going to the website to check it out is: You can't watch this, your operating system is not supported. This is not something that happens by accident. They are ACTIVELY dissuading linux users from watching the teaser. I had to click "view source" just to find the file, and I'm downloading it, but I realize it's very unlikely I'll be able to watch it. They are publishing in some stupid non-standard format. And for what reason? I can't think of a single one. They are giving it away for FREE, why would they be worried about copyright? At the VERY least, if you don't want to get into weird IP battles by using "frowned upon" formats like DivX (though I don't see the problem with OSS formats like Xvid), publish it in straight MPEG, even if it's low resolution, but my goodness, don't DENY your target audience the ability to watch it.

Whoever is in charge of marketing has no clue.As it is, I still don't know if I'll bother going to see it, especially considering how expensive the theaters are these days and how little time I have.If only I could watch the teaser...

It finished downloading by the time I typed this out. And look, mplayer and VLC are both out of luck.

This is not something that happens by accident. They are ACTIVELY dissuading linux users from watching the teaser.

Whoever is in charge of marketing has no clue.

Which one is it: a carefully designed conspiracy against Linux users, or the end result of a naive marketing department that doesn't understand that a large chunk of their target audience uses something other then Windows?

If I had to make a bet, I'd put my money on the latter. I highly doubt there's someone sitting around saying 'Yarr! Let's get those Linux users! That'll teach 'em for being different!". I'd guess the company providing the streaming video brought the claim of 'being able to provide high-quality on-demand streaming video to broadband Internet users using a unique process which makes unauthorized duplication near impossible' to the marketing department for the film. The 'Vividas' company most likely neglected the fact that they wouldn't be able to reliably accommodate users of alternative OSes, and it never occurred to the folks marketing the film to ask.

I've already seen the film twice, so what really shocked me is how well that worked. The video started almost instantly, and I'm on a modest DSL line shared with a neighbor. Good quality. Some noticable compression artifacts and the sound was just slightly out of sync, but still, very good for what it is.

And to those complaining about free advertising: Let's complain instead about the granularity of SlashCode's RSS. There should be a seperate feed for each section, and some way of getting your customized index as a feed. Then you can easily exclude Sci-Fi stuff you think is so off topic.

But I digress. Everything the studio can do to help Sereinty/Firefly/Whedon Enterprises is good. I hope we see more quality naturalistic science fiction [wikipedia.org] like this and Battlestar Gallactica in the future.

Because you might steal that free promotional download and show it to other people, that's why! Then how would Universal make money on that free promotional download or the movie that the free promotional download is promoting?

I mean, come on, it's not that hard! You must tightly control the distribution of free promotional downloads, otherwise filesharers will destroy your company!:)

I was thinking of downloading it, hacking it up a bit in a video editor and releasing a new movie of my own, much better than the original. This would have cost them millions, since nobody would have bothered with the inferior version after that.

Unfortunately, my operating system is unsupported, so they are safe this time.

Yeah, apple.com/trailers is the same way. Why the heck to they care if people download movie trailers? It's utterly ridiculus. My only guess is that the movie studies love to have the control to pull a trailer they deam "inappropriate" at some later date.

.viv? Sounds like a renamed.mpg file. I'm postitive they didn't create a new file format just for this trailer.

The nice thing about linux is that most distros come with the `file` utility. Just run it on the ".viv";

file/path/to/serenity.viv

And it will tell you what kind of file you've got. Just change the extension...you know what, and I'm not in Linux right now to test, but most Linux movie players aren't dominated by file extention, unlike their Windows counterparts. If I were a betting man,

The nice thing about linux is that most distros come with the `file` utility. Just run it on the ".viv";
file/path/to/serenity.viv

Already tried it; it just says 'data', so file doesn't know about it. I've tried it with a number of players so far (xine, mplayer, realplayer, even Windows Media Player running under Codeweavers' crossover) and none of them can read it.

My guess is that it's an mpeg wrapped up in some sort of drm that requires their encryption key to play it.

The format comes from Vividas [vividas.com], and while this page [vividas.com] says they support Linux, they seem to mean it in the sense that you might be able to run their Java player under Linux if you're lucky.

Here's the direct link to the video file, although I still don't know of a Linux player that can handle it

I've done some digging around and unfortunately it looks like:

1) The.viv file is some sort of propriety format2) There's a Java archive (jar) on the page that is automatically selected for Windows or OS X that has a file extension of.jpeg[1]3) Inside the Java archive is a Java applet, PlayerApplet.class, that apparently does nothing but act as a proxy for another file inside the class, a DLL file in the Windows version, probably something similar in the Linux version

Not all nerds want to hear about MS, Linux, New Case Mods, Ham Radio Operators, New Space Probes, Creating Life Out of Amino Acids, Monkeys Learning How To Fly, Reconstructing the 1918 Influenza, etc, etc. But a lot do, or would, if it were to happen. Guess what? Slashdot tries to cater to them all, at least to some extent. Is every single nerd going to be thrilled with every single story? No. Oh well. Are there going to be a slew of nerds out there getting pissed because they're hearing too much about any of the above, including Serenity? Yes. But guess what? Bitching about it won't change a fucking thing. I'm not sure what to tell you if you really don't like it other than a: do it yourself, b: go somewhere else; or c: create a firefox plugin to strip out stories that contain whatever-words-you-don't-want-to-hear-about.

I'm not saying you can't bitch, I'm just saying you're wasting your time, and unless you get some sort of thrill out of playing the down-modded martyr, in the end, it's not going to be worth it.